Yesterday, the United States Department of Energy announced that national research laboratories had finally created a bionic eye to meet Food and Drug Administration standards. And so our transformation into human-cyborg hybrids takes another giant step forward.
Timothy Leary, the psychedelic maestro of that period, declared that “the PC is the LSD of the 1990’s.”
“Imagine your brain being augmented by Google,” the search engine’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Larry Page, said in a 2004 interview. “For example, you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear.”
“I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.”
Kurzweil joins Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing
Spanner isn’t quite Skynet — the self-aware artificial intelligence system in the Terminator movies — but it does show how far we’ve come at building connected systems and databases. “When there are outages, things just sort of flip — client machines access other servers in the system,” Google software engineer Andrew Fikes told Wired. “It’s a much easier service story. … The system responds — and not a human.”
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